Every year since 2019, JPMorgan Chase, the investment bank and financial services holding company, uses its AI Research Awards to empower the best research thinkers across AI, looking for individuals who seek to experiment and challenge and who are at the vanguard of shaping all our futures. This year, Brown CS PhD student Denizalp Goktas was one of just eleven individuals to become a J.P. Morgan PhD Fellow.
Earlier this year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and professional computing society, elevated Brown CS alum Scott Smolka to the rank of Fellow, the organization's highest membership grade, for contributions in process algebra, model checking, and runtime verification. The ACM Fellows Program, initiated in 1993, celebrates the exceptional contributions of leading members of the computing field, and Scott joins a distinguished list of colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership in computing and information technology.
The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a coalition of more than 200 organizations with the mission of enhancing innovation by joining with industry, government, and academia to strengthen research and advance education in computing. Every year, they recognize North American students who show phenomenal research potential with their Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and in 2022, Brown CS alum Jiaju Ma was one of only twenty finalists.
Every year since 2007, the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) has awarded the IROS RoboCup Best Paper Award to the best paper presented at IROS related to RoboCup research. RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal to advance the state of the art of intelligent robots. In 2021, a new paper ("Multi-Resolution POMDP Planning for Multi-Object Search in 3D") by Brown CS doctoral student Kaiyu Zheng and Professors George Konidaris and Stefanie Tellex, along with co-author Yoonchang Sung of MIT CSAIL, took home the honor, as well as a $1,000 prize.
Brown CS Professor
Kathi Fisler has been named a 2021 Distinguished Member for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, and they’ve recognized Kathi for her “Outstanding Educational Contributions to Computing”. The Distinguished Members grade recognizes members who have achieved important accolades or made a significant impact on the computing field, as supported by letters from others in the computing community.
Each year, Cadence, a computational software company focusing on tools for electronic design automation, awards its Women in Technology Scholarship to support and celebrate young women who are starting their careers. Recently, Brown CS student Sreshtaa Rajesh was declared one of the winners, earning a $5,000 stipend. "Your impressive academic achievements, professor recommendations, and drive to shape the future of technology set you apart from the many talented women we considered," writes Academic Network Program Manager Mallory Clemons of Cadence. "We are excited for what the future holds for you and the impact you will make in technology."
NeurIPS, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, is a multi-track interdisciplinary annual meeting that includes invited talks, demonstrations, symposia, and oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. This year, new research (“On the Expressivity of Markov Reward”) by Brown CS alums David Abel and Mark K. Ho (now at DeepMind and Princeton University, respectively), Professor Michael Littman, and their collaborators, Will Dabney, Anna Harutyunyan, Doina Precup, and Satinder Singh (all at DeepMind) has earned one of the event’s highest honors, the Outstanding Paper Award.
In addition to other accolades, Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi of Brown CS has been repeatedly recognized in 2021 for his contributions as a reviewer. Koli Calling is one of the leading international conferences dedicated to the exchange of research and practice relevant to the scholarship of teaching and learning and to education research in the computing disciplines. This month, they named Shriram one of four Superb Reviewers who offered consistently excellent feedback to authors and made significant contributions to the discussion. His fellow awardees are Paul Denny (University of Auckland), Stephen Edwards (Virginia Tech), and Juho Leinonen (University of Helsinki).
Multiple members of the Brown CS community have returned from the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) with two honors for their work. Brown CS alums Sarah Bawabe and Laura Wilson, students Tongyu Zhou and Ezra Marks, and Professor Jeff Huang’s paper (“The UX Factor: Using Comparative Peer Review to Evaluate Designs through User Preferences”) has received an Honorable Mention as well as an Impact Recognition Award.
Last spring, Brown CS was chosen from a pool of candidates across Brown University to receive the 2021 DIAP (Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan) Community Award for academic departments. The honor recognizes an academic unit that has used the DIAP as a vehicle to actively create positive change for their department.
